Sidar Plus

Yeah... I have to say, I LOVE divided soul assassins - it's one of those things that make me feel like I'm playing the Sidar and not "those guys who make a lot of settled great people."
 
thank you for agreeing with me ice! I think that those divided souls make the experience for me. Thanks Warkirby, for at least fleshing those little guys out a bit more. I hate to say it, but i felt a little cheap trying to upgrade to higher powered units without using the souls. Almost felt like... an exploit :nuke:

unfortunately, i doubt my suggestions will ever see the light of day (or production):sad:. They will remain burried in this thread which will settle back into antiquity soon. To think i spent half a day at work daydreaming about all that too!

Oh well, good thing I love FF no matter what.
 
I dunno... I read your suggestions, and I'm somewhat of a modder... >_> <_< and I like the Sidar...
 
Thats a very interesting point... wait whats that sound? sounds like a pulse... my dream... is alive???

Im glad im not the only one who like Sidar! I feel like some civs are so well produced that you really feel the role. I really want there to be more trees when i play lsojfar, and bringing hell to the world as Sheaim is just damn fun. The Bannor crusades against a world gone evil (thanks to previous versions of broader alignments turning the world against me), and dont even get me started about civilizations like the illians that alter the world. The Sidar never had that, but I still always come back to them. Thats why I got excited when i saw a thread for Sidar plus.

And thanks to you Ice, im still excited. I wish you luck in all you projects :D
 
aye, I like the Sidar as well
 
Also, it's entirely possible to open up an xml file and just start editing away yourself. It's pretty intuitive, aside from putting things in the right order which is partially guesswork.
 
I dunno, I stopped worrying about orders pretty recently.
I think the modular system handles that better, exception being promotions.
 
oh god, me mod? Believe me, the idea is tantalizing but I find it hard to get good at/stick with things I am particularly bad at. And i just know i would SUCK at modding. I suck at tying my shoes for example. I think the pair of shoes I wear reguarly has been tied since 2004. :crazyeye:

Back on topic, i think my favorite concept mentioned in this thread is the aforementioned Mist. The idea of that . .. .. .. . floating around, the enemy not knowing exactly what is in it... easily brings the Sidar into their own for me. I have to ask, how practical is the suggestion i made earlier? I wouldnt dream of expecting this work to be done, i just cant help wondering how likely it is that it will come to pass.

...and maybe, just maybe, if i knew what went into making that happen id give it a try. Although im pretty sure I wont be able to figure much of it out.
 
Before you say that you suck at modding, let me inform your of something. Adding divided soul to all recon units consists of taking, opening the XML file, adding a new UU for each recon unit for the sidar, and having them start with divided soul. Thats it - in base FFH, it would consist of opening Kael's XML editor (its an excel file that exports to xml). Once you know what your looking for, that change would take about 5 minutes. Without knowing what you're looking for, you can still do it in less than half an hour. I'm not sure if FF uses that XML editor, but similar things can be done by just opening up notepad and doing copy-paste.

-Colin
 
Also make it require a House of the Grey in the city, so that you don't get it free on starting scouts, and so that non-sidar don't get it.

For the scout UU, I'd call it Observer. Give it a free promotion that increases visibility and makes it invisible, but defensiveonly. And have that somehow removed wen you upgrade it.
 
What I'd do, Kirby, is simple
Auto-aquire promotion, requires: Civ: Sidar, unitcombat: Recon, Tech: Hunting.
Sold.
 
Personally I'd rather a Soul Severer promotion not be given out to anyone for free, but be a promotion that Sidar units of a certain level can purchase. I'd probably allow it for both Recon and Arcane units.




Frankly I see no real justification for the House of the Grey UB. I'd rather the Sidar have a unique Elder Council, which could perhaps give Great People Points for Shades (meaning that they can be gained either from high level units or in the same was as Grigori Adventurers).



I think it could be nice for the Sheaim Sidar Palace to function like Nox Noctis and hide units in your territory. (I might actually prefer to give Nox Noctis some other ability, perhaps allowing units in the Esus holy city to take the Hidden and Hidden Nationality promotions.)

(Note that I'd probably change the Revelation spell so that it can expose units set to be invisible through the Nox Noctis mechanism. That may in fact be the only way to see those who dwell among the mists of the land of the Shades.)



In general, I think settled Great People should provide great people points. That isn't an exclusively Sidar enhancement, but it does make settled Shades more useful.

Also, I'd allow more buildings to boost great people yields. I like to change the Great Library to the Library of Oghma, which increases the Great Sage research yields by 2 instead of 1 and also gives them culture, plus providing a source of Metamagic Mana. To balance its extra strength, it is moved to Arcane Lore. I also like to make the Bazaar of Mammon a world wonder again, make it require and provide Mind Mana, make it boost all merchants and great merchants, and possibly weaken priests. It might also be used to found the Stewards of Inequity guild.



While most shades retire to peaceful professions of Bards, Sages, Merchants, or Engineers, I think it could be interesting to allow more martial shades to instead use their strategic and tactical knowledge to act as FF-style Great Commanders.
 
I suppose you were talking about sidar palace , MC ?




for the Mist , evoked by Azael , i made a similar feature for the Aifons that work only on water, but it wouldn't be difficult to make it work on earth for Sidar.
 
Thats great to hear black! Ill need to search through the aifon thread for mention of that relative concept, sounds like it will be cool too! Ive been playing a steady sidar game on an isolated island and I just wish i could leave my mark on the lay of the land. Patches of mist would certainly achieve that goal. Okay okay, Ill try shutting up about mist for a little bit.

@MC, the idea of revelation being the means to see through mist is waaay better then my idea of air magic doing the job. And soul sever on mages... ehhh. They already have dimeonsional mana which allows a better system of teleportation. Seems redundant, but thats just my two cents.

The great library suggestion is intuitive though. I hate to admit this, but my strategy is the rush research to writting so i can get great library. Simply because it gives me an enormous advantage over my fellow civs research-wise. Philosophy + pacifist + great library + 2-3 sages + scholarship civic + sidar research bonus for specialists = a new great sage ever 20 -30 turns and i quickly get late game technology... like its so fast i start to wonder if im cheating. Pushing the great library to later in the game would make sense to me, as a person who exploits this possible oversight frequently. Additionally it will fall under what i personally think of as the 'knowledge' branch of the tech tree that way.

I will also admit that reading about modifying the xml was confusing. I opened up my xml and my brain had one of those 'crash to desktop' errors.
 
I will also admit that reading about modifying the xml was confusing. I opened up my xml and my brain had one of those 'crash to desktop' errors.

Simple way to learn xml.

Step 1. Pick an existing unit that you understand. ie, that you know exactly what it does, upgrades to, etc.

Step 2. Open the unitinfos (assets/xml/units/Civ4UnitInfos.xml)

Step 3. Look for the commented name of the unit. You can find this by searching for " <unitname>" Note the extra space at the start.

Step 4. Look down the various xml tags for the unit. Try to match up the names of tags, to things you know the unit can do. Most of them are fairly self explanatory from their name.

Step 5. Ask for help in the mod-modder's thread when you find one you don't understand


Repeat a few times, and you'll fairly quickly gain an understanding of what each part does. XML isn't really programming. It's more like a jigsaw puzzle. The tags are pieces, and you just pick which ones you want and stick them together until it works.
 
I appreciate the advice! That made sense. I intend to experiment in the near future now. My goal is simple: Make a unit that does EVERY cool thing I can think of and name him Azael.


Im about to get waaay off topic so i will put it in spoiler tags.
Spoiler :

I have a question actually. What is the difference between xml, dll, and python? I hear them all mentioned frequently and yet i have no idea the difference. I also cant help wondering how MaxAstro made casting Air 3 cast a summonable 'mount' for lack of a better term (as seen from description only here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=333563)

I expect it to be complicated, but i felt my imagination open up when i thought about how that is done. If it simply grants flight, awesome. If i creates something you can get onto and ride, amazing. If it changes what kind of unit you are, omg. In any of these cases, i will continue to daydream about importing that function to my aforementioned "Azael" class unit.

PS. Is this new thread worthy? Im about to look around for these topics in the hopes that i didnt blatantly ignore a "READ THIS" somewhere.
 
XML is not a programming language, but a markup language. It is just used to store data to be used by the C++ and Python code. The data from the XML is stored by the game when it loads, so changing the files has no effect until you close and reopen the program.

(IIrc, xml technically can be used as a real programing language, but that is rare. In Civ IV, the only real xml programing is in the ls system, used to control some graphics. That is often considered the hardest code the game uses, and I don't know anyone who dares to touch it. Some may consider the XML schema used to let the DLL read the xml coding, but that is a bit of a stretch. The way xml is usually used it is the easiest thing to mod.)


Most of the game's real code is in the Software developer Kit (SDK), which is written in C++. There are a lot of C++ files, which are often very long and very interdependent. The SDK allows you to change almost any aspect of the game, apart from a few things that are hard coded into the game engine, dealing with things like graphics, terrain elevation, the difference between water, land, and peaks, etc. The SDK files cannot run on their own, but must be compiled together into a single DLL file. The DLL is a binary file which cannot be uncompiled, so editing ti requires access to the source code.


Python is one of the simplest real computing languages. It is practically pseudocode. One annoying thing about it is that it is highly dependent on white space. It is a rather high level language, which makes it really show when compared to C++. It has the advantage of not needing to be compiled, so things coded in python can be changed easily. Civ IV is designed to let you edit python while the game is running, reloading all the python files whenever one of them is saved. unfortunately, the game generally fails to reload the python files that did not exist in the unmodded game. That means that saving a python file while in the middle of the game will mess up the interface and disable things like python spells. You can still save the game though, and then restart the program to get it working properly again. Many things in the SDK are outsourced to python, and python can call many special SDK functions that would not be called otherwise.
 
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